Cisco Systems is partnering with NASA to create a massive online collaborative global monitoring platform called the "Planetary Skin" to capture, collect, analyze and report data on environmental conditions around the world, while also providing researchers social web services for collaboration.

This type of platform is essential for Climate and Ecosystem researchers, but it also might be a sneak peak at the future of the Internet.

'Smart Planet': Age of Sensors & Structured DataIf life in the past few decades has been forever altered by complex microprocessor chips, the next century could see the same social disruption via simple, low cost networked sensors and 'embedded objects' that mirror a digital signal of our analog world. But making this disconnected data relevant is a challenge.

The 'Planetary Skin' platform [video] will stitch together 'petabytes' of unstructured data collected by sensors (land, sea, air, space) reporting on changing environmental conditions. The platform will also allow for 'streamlining of decision making' and 'collaborative swarming' on analysis of relevant data. The project's first layer, “Rainforest Skin,” will be prototyped during 2009.

Good for NASA, Great for Cisco, and Wonderful for 'Mirror World' Metaverse EnthusiastsThe benefits to NASA and Planetary system researchers is clear. Forget about Facebook, these scientists are looking for a functional digital research simulation 'Mirror World' (as envisioned by David Gelertner).

Meanwhile, Cisco is working diligently to make itself the most relevant web company in the next era of Internet architecture where collaboration, video, 3D simulations and structured data change the nature of our interactions. 'Planetary Skin' might be Cisco Systems under the radar, but out in the open effort of essentially building its own Internet of Tomorrow.

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Comment Thread (1 Response)

Oh yeah boy. Score another one for mirror worlds and also for total system quantification. It’s about time somebody other than Google, the U.S. govtuy & Open Street Map (I consider Microsoft and Yahoo pretenders in this space) got serious about crowd-sourcing and structuring data atop a planetary sim. A you point out, this is a big step forward as it will accelerate scientific, business and social efforts of all sorts. Gelernter will be proud.